Johannes Vermeer, Asian porcelain, and the primacy of painting in seventeenth-century Holland

This dissertation reconsiders the role of foreign commodities—especially Asian porcelain—in the genre paintings of Johannes Vermeer (1632–75). The global turn in art historical scholarship has revised our conception of seventeenth-century Dutch art, highlighting the cross-cultural contact of both people and objects, and deploying new methodologies from diverse disciplines. While these studies have enriched our understanding of the historical context in which these works were produced, too often the foreign objects depicted within paintings are construed only as ciphers of trade or transcriptions of material prototypes. Vermeer’s art too has been subjected to this dependence on the priority of the material object. Recent scholarship has tended to cast Vermeer as merely replicating global objects, while overlooking the artist’s nuanced engagement with them in relation to his larger project of pictorial mimesis. My dissertation integrates a consideration of artifice and the distinctive status of painting into a close examination of Asian porcelain in Vermeer’s genre scenes. First, I recast Vermeer’s hometown of Delft as a cosmopolitan entrepôt with a unique affinity with Asia, owing to its roles as a Dutch East India Company (VOC) chamber city and as the epicenter of Dutch Delftware imitating Asian porcelain. Then, I provide a deeper study of the recurring global objects (with a focus on Asian porcelain) in Vermeer’s works than has been undertaken to date. Though the starting point for my project is a material culture study, I contend that identifying real-world referents for Vermeer’s painted objects is valuable to the extent that it illuminates the artist’s departures from actual models and allows us to assess whether such aesthetic maneuvers are unusual relative to his peers. Borrowing the terminology of the paragone (comparison) from Renaissance art and artistic theory, I propose a “modern paragone” as a rivalry between Dutch painting and Asian porcelain. Finally, through a close analysis of Vermeer’s “porcelain paintings” featuring distinctively re-presented porcelain objects, I argue that these motifs must be understood as vehicles for self-conscious meditations on the status of art in a newly globalizing commodity culture.2024-09-30T00:00:00